Library Research Guides: Gender Studies: Features

Spotlight on Disability Studies

A group of activists, including Judy Heumann (center, with yellow stockings) protest for the enforcement of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, in April of 1977 Introduction
Throughout history, communities of disabled, neurodiverse, crip, and sick people have been overlooked and oversimplified in academic conversations. Disability activism and political movements carved out a space for addressing ableism in research and academia; as a result, disability studies has emerged. Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores disabled identities in the humanities and social sciences. For this spotlight on disability studies, we include neurodiverse, crip, and sick identities in our definition of disability.

To read more about disability language and the use of "crip," enjoy this article by Dean Strauss: "Queer Crips: Reclaiming Language," and Brittany Wong's Huffington Post article "It's Perfectly OK to call a Disabled Person 'Disabled,' And Here's Why."

We also recommend the following resources that helped with this feature:

Resources for Further Exploration
A selection of articles, online compilations, and other resources relevant to disability studies

"Critical Disability Theory" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
"Disability Pride: A Q&A with Dr. Susan Ghiaciuc, Disability Studies Co-Coordinator" (James Madison University)
"Critical Readings in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies" (Springer Link)
"Disability: Part of the Equity Equation" (Office of Disability Employment Office)
"College Students with Disabilities Deserve Accessible Campuses" (The Washington Post)
"Disability Studies Resource List" (American Council of Learned Societies)
"Academia's Ableist Culture Laid Bare" (Springer Nature)

Next Steps
The following features also cover topics of disability studies:

Disability Awareness & Pride Months (Media Studies)
Recommended Resources and Films from IU Disability Services for Students (Media Services)
Recommended Disabled Reads from the Children's Collection (Education Library)
Disability Awareness Resources (Indiana Institute on Disability and Community Library)

Image Description: A group of activists, including Judy Heumann (center, with yellow stockings) protest for the enforcement of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, in April of 1977. Later that month, the protesters would occupy a federal building in San Francisco in protest in a sit-in that lasted more than 25 days. Photo by Wally McNamee / CORBIS / via Getty Images

Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
ISBN: 9781478025009
Publication Date: 2022-10-31
In Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women's Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements.
Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance by Robert McRuer
ISBN: 9781479874156
Publication Date: 2018-01-16
Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or “crip times.” Throughout Crip Times, McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture—activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance—provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of “aspiration” dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher’s England. Crip Times asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined “us” in need of protection from “them.”
Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence by J. Logan Smilges
ISBN: 9781517914097
Publication Date: 2022-10-25
Championing the liberatory potential of silence to address the fraught disability politics of queerness In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Queer Silence begins by historicizing silence's negative reputation, beginning with the ways homophile activists rejected medical models pathologizing homosexuality as a disability, resulting in the silencing of disability itself. This silencing was redoubled by HIV/AIDS activism's demand for "out, loud, and proud" rhetorical activities that saw silence as capitulation. Reading a range of cultural artifacts whose relative silence has failed to attract queer attachment, from anonymous profiles on Grindr to ex-gays to belated gender transitions to disability performance art, Smilges argues for silence's critical role in serving the needs of queers who are never named as such. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence, a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance, sociality, and survival.
Introducing Disability Studies by Ronald J. Berger
ISBN: 9781588268662
Publication Date: 2013-01-04
Ronald Berger provides students with a comprehensive, accessible introduction to the key themes and controversies in disability studies. This innovative textbook: * provides historical context, from ancient times to the present * traces disability's impact throughout the life course * gives prominence to the voices of people with disabilities * explores popular culture's role in distorting ideas about disability * addresses emerging ethical issues, such as the implications of genetic selection. Illustrating the profound consequences of differing conceptions of physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments, Berger provides a solid foundation for making sense of disability as a social phenomenon.
May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future by Chris Martin
ISBN: 9780063020153
Publication Date: 2022-08-09
An author and educator's pioneering approach to helping autistic students find their voices through poetry--a powerful and uplifting story that shows us how to better communicate with people on the spectrum and explores how we use language to express our seemingly limitless interior lives. Adults often find it difficult to communicate with autistic students and try to "fix" them. But what if we found a way to help these kids use their natural gifts to convey their thoughts and feelings? What if the traditional structure of language prevents them from communicating the full depth of their experiences? What if the most effective and most immediate way for people on the spectrum to express themselves is through verse, which mirrors their sensory-rich experiences and patterned thoughts? May Tomorrow Be Awake explores these questions and opens our eyes to a world of possibility. It is the inspiring story of one educator's journey to understand and communicate with his students--and the profound lessons he learned. Chris Martin, an award-winning poet and celebrated educator, works with non-verbal children and adults on the spectrum, teaching them to write poetry. The results have been nothing short of staggering for both these students and their teacher. Through his student's breathtaking poems, Martin discovered what it means to be fully human. Martin introduces the techniques he uses in the classroom and celebrates an inspiring group of young autistic thinkers--Mark, Christophe, Zach, and Wallace--and their electric verse, which is as artistically dazzling as it is stereotype-shattering. In telling each of their stories, Martin illuminates the diverse range of autism and illustrates how each so-called "deficit" can be transformed into an asset when writing poems. Meeting these remarkable students offers new insight into disability advocacy and reaffirms the depth of our shared humanity. Martin is a teacher and a lifelong learner, May Tomorrow Be Awake is written from a desire to teach and to learn--about the mind, about language, about human potential--and the lessons we have to share with one other.
Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education by Nicole Brown (Editor); Jennifer Leigh (Editor)
ISBN: 9781787354982
Publication Date: 2020-10-13
Rather than embracing difference, academic ecosystems seek to normalize and homogenize ways of working and of being a researcher. As a consequence, ableism is an endemic experience in academia, though to date no attempt has been made to theorize those experiences. Ableism in Academia provides an interdisciplinary outlook on ableism that is currently missing. Through reporting of research data and exploring personal experiences, the contributors explore the concept of what it means to be and to work outside the so-called norm. The volume brings together a range of perspectives, including feminism, post-structuralism, Derridean and Foucauldian theory, crip theory, and disability theory, and draws on a number of related disciplines. Contributors use various schools of theory to raise awareness and increase understanding of the marginalized. These theories are placed in the context of neoliberal academia, and used to interrogate aspects of identity and how disability is performed, and to argue that ableism is not just a disability issue. This timely collection will be of interest to researchers in disability studies, higher education studies, and sociology, as well as to those working across the social sciences.
Blackness and Disability: critical examinations and cultural interventions by Christopher M. Bell (Editor)
ISBN: 9781611860108
Publication Date: 2012-02-01
Disability Studies diverge from the medical model of disability (which argues that disabled subjects can and should be "fixed") to view disability as socially constructed, much in the same way other identities are. The work of reading black and disabled bodies is not only recovery work, but work that requires a willingness to deconstruct the systems that would keep those bodies in separate spheres. This pivotal volume uncovers the misrepresentations of black disabled bodies and demonstrates how those bodies transform systems and culture. Drawing on key themes in Disability Studies and African American Studies, these collected essays complement one another in interesting and dynamic ways, to forge connections across genres and chronotopes, an invitation to keep blackness and disability in conversation. With an analysis of disability as a result of war, studies of cognitive impairment and slavery in fiction, representations of slavery and violence in photography, deconstructions of illness (cancer and AIDS) narratives, comparative analyses of black and Latina/o and black and African subjects, analysis of treatments of disability in hip-hop, and commentary on disability, blackness, and war, this volume shows that the historical lines of demarcation in this field are permeable and should be challenged.
Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer
ISBN: 9780253009340
Publication Date: 2013-05-16
In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.

Journals

Journal Articles

Brown, N., & Ramlackhan, K. (2022). Exploring experiences of ableism in academia: a constructivist inquiry. Higher Education (00181560), 83(6), 1225–1239.
Brueggemann, B. J., Garland-Thomson, R., & Kleege, G. (2005). What Her Body Taught (Or, Teaching about and with a Disability): A Conversation. Feminist Studies, 31(1), 13–33.
Davis, L. J. (2022). Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards: Disability Studies Then, Now, and When. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 16(3), 253–264.
Davis, L. J. (1999). Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies. American Literary History, 11(3), 500–512.
Ginsburg, F., & Rapp, R. (2013). Disability Worlds. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 53–68.
Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Liddiard, K., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2021). Key Concerns for Critical Disability Studies. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, 1(1), 27–49.
McRuer, R. (2005). Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies. PMLA, 120(2), 586–592.
Williamson, B. (2015). Access. In R. Adams, B. Reiss, & D. Serlin (Eds.), Keywords for Disability Studies (pp. 14–17). NYU Press.

Databases

Study Resources

Studying with Dyslexia by Janet Godwin
ISBN: 9780230390560
Publication Date: 2012-08-01
As a dyslexic student you have a unique learning style. Understanding this can help you take control and study in a way that is most effective for you. Full of practical advice and visual examples, this friendly book will guide you through the dyslexic learning style. It gives you all the essential knowledge and ideas needed to manage your dyslexia positively. Handy for students at any level, this easy-to-read guide: * suggests core strategies for doing things differently to work with your dyslexia, instead of against it * covers individual study skills, including organisation, reading, writing and taking exams * provides information on the support that should be available to you as a student.
Navigating College: A Handbook on Self Advocacy by Elesia Ashkenazy & Melody Latimer
ISBN: 9781938800009
Publication Date: 2013-07-01
Leaving high school and going to college is complicated for everyone. But if you're a student on the autism spectrum who is about to enter higher education for the first time, it might be a little bit more complicated for you. Maybe you're worried about getting accommodations, getting places on time, or dealing with sensory issues in a new environment. Maybe you could use some advice on how to stay healthy at school, handle dating and relationships, or talk to your friends and classmates about your disability. Maybe you want to talk to someone who's already dealt with these issues. That's where we come in. Navigating College is an introduction to the college experience from those of us who've been there. The writers and contributors are Autistic adults, and we're giving you the advice that we wish someone could have given us when we headed off to college. We wish we could sit down and have a chat with each of you, to share our experiences and answer your questions. But since we can't teleport, and some of us have trouble meeting new people, this book is the next best thing. So as you go back to school, check out a copy of Navigating College for yourself or your loved one. We ve done this all before--let us help you out.

Spotlight on Queer Poetry & Poetics

Cover image for feature. Text reads "Queer Poetry and Poetics, an introduction" Poetry often touches the core of our complex and intersecting identities as human beings. From the outset of recorded history the identities embodied in poems are often those of marginalized groups. This is certainly true with regard to queer poets. From classical poets like Sappho to luminaries of literary modernism like Hart Crane to contemporary poets like Ocean Vuong, queer experience and desire is an undeniable presence in the poetry and poetics of the global canon. Here below is just a small sampling of poetry from queer poets from a variety of backgrounds and intersectionalities.

Resources for Further Exploration
A selection of articles, online compilations, and other resources relevant to queer poetry & poetics

"Queer Poetics: Deviant Swerves, in Three" (from The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies)
"Queer Love Poems: LGBTQ love poetry by and for gay men, lesbians, and the queer community" (Poetry Foundation)
"LGBTQ Poetry: The Tradition" (Poets.org)
"12 queer and trans poets to read for National Poetry Month" (NBC News)
"7 Queer Poetry Books I Wish I Could Give to My Teenage Self" (Electric Literature)
"Queering Poetics, or “Werking” It" (Lambda Literary)

Next Steps
If you'd like to engage more deeply with National Poetry Month, the IU Libraries Arts & Humanities department has put together a number of features and guides to showcase our holdings relevant to this month-long celebration of poetry. You'll find those, below:

Poetry & Poetics in Music & Media (Media Studies)
Spotlight on Black LGBTQ+ Poetry (Gender Studies)
Black American Poets and Poetry (English & American Literature)

Anthologies
Anthologies of poems by queer poets

Nepantla: an anthology for queer poets of color by Christopher Soto (Editor)
ISBN: 9781937658786
Publication Date: 2018-05-01
The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United StatesIn 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!
The World That Belongs to Us: an Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia by Aditi Angiras; Akhil Katyal
ISBN: 9789353574574
Publication Date: 2020-09-22
'A bold and necessary correction to the subcontinent's poetry canon.' - Jeet Thayil This first-of-its-kind anthology brings together the best of contemporary queer poetry from South Asia, both from the subcontinent and its many diasporas.The anthology features well-known voices like Hoshang Merchant, Ruth Vanita, Suniti Namjoshi, Kazim Ali, Rajiv Mohabir as well as a host of new poets. The themes range from desire and loneliness, sexual intimacy and struggles, caste and language, activism both on the streets and in the homes, the role of family both given and chosen, and heartbreaks and heartjoins. Writing from Bangalore, Baroda, Benares, Boston, Chennai, Colombo, Dhaka, Delhi, Dublin, Karachi, Kathmandu, Lahore, London, New York City, and writing in languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Urdu, Manipuri, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and, of course, English, the result is an urgent, imaginative and beautiful testament to the diversity, politics, aesthetics and ethics of queer life in South Asia today.
Flicker and Spark: a contemporary queer anthology of spoken word and poetry by Regie Cabico; Brittany Fonte
ISBN: 9780982955390
Publication Date: 2013-02-01
"When we talk about literature, there are tweets and there are three-volume novels. And, selected poems and collected poems and a poem. There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through. I think post-identity is sort of a zen concept. You know like, "Wake up " (Smacks hands with a sharp clap). Whats the identity of that moment? Whats the gender of that moment? There are spots where there is no identity whatsoever. But by the nature of who I am or who any of us are we will need to be in groups that resemble us. Its so crucial to have those identity groups where you gather and are reinforced by your conversations. And dont live there. Something Im really interested in is how queer identity is like an immigrant group. We need to find each other at various points to say, "God-Iceland " But we dont live in Iceland. I think "post" is a desire to have a little space, but I dont think its a place where you get to stay." -Eileen Myles
QDA: a queer disability anthology by Raymond Luczak (Editor)
ISBN: 9781941960028
Publication Date: 2015-11-12
Featuring fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics by 48 writers from around the world, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology proves that intersectionality isn't just a buzzword. It's a penetrating and unforgettable look into the hearts and souls of those defiant enough to explore their own vulnerabilities and demonstrate their own strengths. Here is a gathering of people with the transformative-and political-power of love that transcends gender and ability. Ignorance is the biggest barrier. "An anthology often creates a community. In this respect, QDA is truly groundbreaking because it brings two wonderful communities together. There is not a single style, genre, or opinion in the book, but an orchestra of voices. Their seminal works mirror-and do not mirror-each other. Taken together, they light a brilliant path of honesty." -Jennifer Bartlett, co-editor of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability
Building Fires in the Snow: a collection of Alaska LGBTQ short fiction and poetry by Martha Amore (Editor); Lucian Childs (Editor)
ISBN: 9781602233010
Publication Date: 2016-09-15
Diversity has always been central to Alaska identity, as the state's population consists of people with many different backgrounds, viewpoints, and life experiences. This book opens a window into these diverse lives, gathering stories and poems about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer life into a brilliant, path-breaking anthology. In these pages we see the panoply of LGBTQ life in Alaska today, from the quotidian urban adventures of a family--shopping, going out, working--to intimate encounters with Alaska's breathtaking natural beauty. At a time of great change and major strides in LGBTQ civil rights, Building Fires in the Snow shows us an Alaska that shatters stereotypes and reveals a side of Alaska that's been little seen until now.

Individual Collections
Works by queer poets exploring queerness, from across time

The Renunciations by Donika Kelly
ISBN: 9781644450536
Publication Date: 2021-05-04
An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one's sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of "the oracle"--an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends--the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma--a home whose construction starts "with a razing."
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
ISBN: 9781644450147
Publication Date: 2020-03-03
Natalie Diaz's highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible." Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope--in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia
ISBN: 9781571315212
Publication Date: 2020-08-11
"Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages." And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon's butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when "because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes." Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country's long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with. With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. "Sometimes even a diamond was once alive" writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says "has deadly superpowers." And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia's debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.
The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi
ISBN: 9780300242645
Publication Date: 2019-03-26
How can a search for self‑knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi's arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. These poems constitute an artifact of a groundbreaking and original author whose work reflects a long journey self‑guided through tarot, therapy, and the arts. Foregrounding the power of friendship, Yanyi's poems converse with friends as much as with artists both living and dead, from Agnes Martin to Maggie Nelson to Robin Coste Lewis. This instructive collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.
This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781452962238
Publication Date: 2019-09-03
The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man--available for the first time in the United States "i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative." Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is "a prayer against breaking," writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. "By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we've been waiting for." Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay." Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
Black Queer Hoe by Britteney Black Rose Kapri; Danez Smith (Introduction by)
ISBN: 9781608469529
Publication Date: 2018-09-04
Black Queer Hoeis a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation. Women's sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries. Britteney Black Rose Kapriis a Chicago performance poet and playwright. Currently she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. Her work has been featured inPoetry Magazine, Button Poetry, Seven Scribes, and many other outlets, and anthologized inThe BreakBeat PoetsandThe BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. She is a contributor toBlack Nerd Problems, a Pink Door Retreat Fellow, and a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient.
Feeld by Jos Charles
ISBN: 9781571315052
Publication Date: 2018-08-14
Jos Charles's revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. "i care so much abot the whord i cant reed." In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles's electrifying transliteration of English--Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect--what is old is made new again. "gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage." "did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye." The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer--making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.
Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
ISBN: 9781555977856
Publication Date: 2017-09-05
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
ISBN: 9781556594953
Publication Date: 2016-04-05
Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night--sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side-- waiting. Born in Saigon, Vietnam,Ocean Vuongattended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection,Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.
IRL by Tommy Pico
ISBN: 9780991429868
Publication Date: 2016-09-01
IRL is a sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message, rooted in the epic tradition of A.R. Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyonc#65533;'s visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English. He's plagued by an indecision, unsure of which obsessions, attractions, and impulses are essentially his, and which are the result of Christian conversion, hetero- patriarchal/colonialist white supremacy, homophobia, Bacardi, gummy candy, and not getting laid. IRL asks, what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history? Teebs feels compelled towards "boys, burgers, booze," though he begins to suspect there is perhaps a more ancient goddess calling to him behind art, behind music, behind poetry.
Jimmy's Blues by James Baldwin
ISBN: 9780312051044
Publication Date: 1990-11-01
Finally in paperback, here is James Baldwin's only collection of poems. Baldwin's language is deceptively simple--this poetry is easily understood. But the emotions behind the words go to the core not only of the poet's soul, but of America's. Readers will see Baldwin here in both a familiar and an altogether different light.
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde
ISBN: 0393040909
Publication Date: 1997-09-01
"These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."—Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms—beautifully, forcefully—for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate."—Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving."—Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume."—Out Magazine
Frank O'Hara - Selected Poems by Mark Ford (Editor); Frank O'Hara
ISBN: 9780307268150
Publication Date: 2008-02-26
Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Although he grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, O’Hara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city’s artistic life. O’Hara’s style exudes an insistent, seductive glamour; his mercurial poems, at once open-ended and startlingly immediate, radiate an insouciant confidence that has lost none of its freshness over the decades. O’Hara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns. This generous new selection by Mark Ford reflects all the phases and varied achievements of O’Hara’s tragically foreshortened career, including his drama, and is followed by an appendix of key prose texts such as “Personism,” in which O’Hara succinctly summed up his overall approach to poetry: “You just go on your nerve.”
Poems by Elizabeth Bishop; Saskia Hamilton
ISBN: 9780374126568
Publication Date: 2011-02-01
This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America s greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and poets alike. Bishop s poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later lived human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. This new edition offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentiethcentury poetry.
White Buildings Poems by Hart Crane
ISBN: 9780871401793
Publication Date: 1926
Crane's first collection of poems, published when he was twenty-seven, displays a prodigious gift already at the height of its powers. This first book of poems by hart Crane, one of his three major collections, was originally published in 1926. The themes in White Buildings are abstract and metaphysical, but Crane's associations and images spring from the American scene. Eugene O'Neill wrote: "Hart Crane's poems are profound and deep-seeking. In them he reveals, with a new insight and unique power, the mystic undertones of beauty which move words to express vision."
Heliodora, and Other Poems by Hilda Doolittle
ISBN: 9781334364273
Publication Date: 1924
Excerpt from Heliodora, and Other Poems The poem Lais has in italics a translation of the Plato epigram in the Greek Anthology. Heliodora has in italics the two Meleager epigrams from the Anthology. In Nossis is the translation of the opening lines of the Garland of Meleager and the poem of Nossis herself in the Greek Anthology. The four Sappho fragments are re-worked freely. The Odyssey is a translation of the opening of the first book. The Ion is a translation of the latter part of the first long choros of the Ion of Euripides.

Monographs
Selection of texts from our catalog with an emphasis on queerness and poetry

Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: rethinking the sexed body in verse and visual culture by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (Editor); Christopher Reed (Editor)
ISBN: 9781472468147
Publication Date: 2017-01-23
Augmenting recent developments in theories of gender and sexuality, this anthology marks a compelling new phase in queer scholarship. Navigating notions of silence, misunderstanding, pleasure, and even affects of phobia in artworks and texts, the essays in this volume propose new and surprising ways of understanding the difficulty--even failure--of the epistemology of the closet. By treating "queer" not as an identity but as an activity, this book represents a divergence from previous approaches associated with Lesbian and Gay Studies. The authors in this anthology refute the interpretive ease of binaries such as "out" versus "closeted" and "gay" versus "straight," and recognize a more opaque relationship of identity to pleasure. The essays range in focus from photography, painting, and film to poetry, Biblical texts, lesbian humor, and even botany. Evaluating the most recent critical theories and introducing them in close examinations of objects and texts, this book queers the study of verse and visual culture in new and exciting ways.
Queer Lyrics: difficulty and closure in American poetry by John Emil Vincent; John Vincent
ISBN: 9780312294977
Publication Date: 2003-05-02
Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.
The Poetics of Cruising: queer visual culture from Whitman to Grindr by Jack Parlett
ISBN: 9781452966502
Publication Date: 2022-02-15
A groundbreaking new history of urban cruising through the lenses of urban poets The Poetics of Cruising explores the relationship between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of leading poets, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to Eileen Myles in the twenty-first. What is it that happens, asks Jack Parlett, and what is it that is sought, in this often transient moment of perception we call cruising, this perceptual arena where acts of looking between strangers are intensified and eroticized? Parlett believes that this moment is not only optical in nature but visual: a mode of looking that warrants comparison with the ways in which we behold still and moving images. Whether it's Whitman's fixation with daguerreotypes, Langston Hughes's hybrid photographic works, or Frank O'Hara's love of Hollywood movie stars, argues Parlett, the history of poets cruising abounds with this intermingling between the verbal and the visual, the passing and the fixed. To look at someone in the act of cruising, this history suggests, is to capture, consider, and aestheticize, amid the flux and instantaneity of urban time. But it is also to reveal the ambivalence at the heart of this erotic search, where power may be unevenly distributed across glances, and gendered and racialized bodies are marked. Thus, in identifying for the first time this confluence of cruising, poetry, and visual culture, Parlett concludes that the visual erotic economy associated with gay cruising today, exemplified by the photographic grid of an app like Grindr, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Innovative, astute, and highly readable, and drawing on compelling archival material, The Poetics of Cruising is a must for scholars of queer and LGBTQ literature and culture, modern and contemporary poetry, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.
Queer Troublemakers: the poetics of flippancy by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
ISBN: 9781350079359
Publication Date: 2019-08-08
Irreverent and provoking, the figure of the 'queer troublemaker' is a disruptive force both poetically and politically. Tracing the genealogy of this figure in modern avant-garde American poetry, Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain develops innovative close readings of the works of Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson. Exploring how these writers play with identity, gender, sexuality and genre, Bussey-Chamberlain constructs a queer poetics of flippancy that can subvert ideas of success and failure, affect and affectation, performance and performativity, poetry and being.
Queer Optimism: lyric personhood and other felicitous persuasions by Michael D. Snediker
ISBN: 9780816649990
Publication Date: 2008-12-03
'Queer Optimism' presents a new paradigm for queer theory. Through fresh, perceptive, and sensitive readings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop, Snediker reveals that each of these poets demonstrated an interest in the durability of positive affects.
Chaucer's Queer Poetics: rereading the dream trio by Susan Schibanoff
ISBN: 9780802090355
Publication Date: 2006-10-07
Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems - the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles - began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer Poetics, Susan Schibanoff interrogates why the tripartite model remains so tenacious even when literary history does not support it. Revealing deeply rooted Francophobic, homophobic, and nationalistic biases, Schibanoff examines the development paradigm and demonstrates that 'liberated Chaucer' depends on antiquated readings of key source texts for the dream trilogy. This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.
The Poetics of Waste by Christopher Schmidt
ISBN: 9781137402783
Publication Date: 2014-06-05
Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

Articles
Selection of scholarly articles from journals in our holdings

Galarte, Francisco J. “Transgender Chican@ Poetics: Contesting, Interrogating, and Transforming Chicana/o Studies.” Chicano/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas En Letras Y Cambio Social, vol. 13, no. 2, Spring 2014, pp. 118–39.
Spitzer, Jennifer. “The Heterodox Psychology and Queer Poetics of Auden in the 1930s.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, Mar. 2019, p. 19.
Vincent, John. “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, July 1998, pp. 155–75.
Vogel, Shane. “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife.” Criticism, vol. 48, no. 3, July 2006, pp. 397–425.
Flint, Kate. “The ‘Hour of Pink Twilight’: Lesbian Poetics and Queer Encounters on the Fin-de-Siecle Street.” Victorian Studies, vol. 51, no. 4, June 2009, p. 687.
Arckens, Elien. “‘In This Told-Backward Biography’: Marianne Moore Against Survival in Her Queer Archival Poetry.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1/2, Apr. 2016, pp. 111–27.
Phillips, Siobhan. “Intimacy, Epistolarity, and the Work of Queer Mourning in James Schuyler’s Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 55–73.
Quashie, Kevin. “Black Masculinity and Queer Gendering in Rita Dove’s ‘Thomas and Beulah.’” CLA Journal, vol. 59, no. 4, June 2016, pp. 364–80.
Merrydew, Aimee. “Reflecting (On) the Body: Trans Self-Representation and Resistance in the Poetry of Ely Shipley.” Comparative American Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, Mar. 2020, pp. 58–72.
Boone, Bruce, and Frank O’Hara. “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara.” Social Text, no. 1, Jan. 1979, pp. 59–92.

Podcasts
Episodes of podcasts featuring queer poets

"Ocean Vuong: A Life Worthy of Our Breath" (On Being)
"Jericho Brown Small Truths and Other Surprises" (On Being)
"Natalie Diaz vs. the Lexicon" (The VS Podcast)
"Cyrée Jarelle Johnson vs. Satisfaction" (The VS Podcast)
"Tommy Pico vs Instinct" (The VS Podcast)
"Aurielle Marie vs. Audacity" (The VS Podcast)
"Yanyi vs. the Personal" (The VS Podcast)
"All The Apostles are Black, All the Saints Queer, and All of Them Are Brave (Pt. 1)" (Roll Call)
"All The Apostles are Black, All the Saints Queer, and All of Them Are Brave (Pt. 2)" (Roll Call)

Recitations
Audio readings of poems by queer poets

"Of Course She Looked Back," Natalie Diaz (Poetry Unbound)
"I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party," Chen Chen (Poetry Unbound)
"i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense," Danez Smith (Poetry Unbound)
"In the Chapel of St. Mary’s," Donika Kelly (Poetry Unbound)
"Sestina," Elizabeth Bishop (Poetry Unbound)
"Daybreak," Jake Skeets (Poetry Unbound)
“Seventh Circle of Earth," Ocean Vuong (Poetry Unbound)

Interviews
Text and video interviews with queer poets

"Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong" (The Paris Review)
"Layli Long Soldier Interviews Billy-Ray Belcourt" (BOMB)
"What’s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson" (The Paris Review)
"Ways to Become Unpinnable: Talking with Natalie Diaz" (The Rumpus)

Online Collections
Queer poetry collections, available freely online

Queer Indigenous Poetics (ANMLY)
Queering in Plain Sight: a folio of queer fashion (ANMLY)

Spotlight on Consensual Non-monogamy

Consensual Non-monogamy
Consensual non-monogamy is an umbrella term used to describe any agreed-upon romantic/sexual relationship that falls outside of the exclusive, dyadic (two-person) structure of monogamy, including polyamory and open relationships. Though non-monogamous relationships have gained greater contemporary visibility, it has existed in many and various forms across history. This guide provides an introduction to both scholarly and popular resources for those wishing to learn more about consensual non-monogamy.

Getting Started

5 Radical Ways People Do Non-Monogamy That You Need to Know About (Everyday Feminism)
The Extraordinary Political Power Of Moving ‘Beyond Monogamy’ (The Establishment)
Ethical Non-Monogamy: The Rise of Multi-Partner Relationships (BBC)
What Ethical Non-Monogamy Really Means & Why People Practice It (Mind Body Green)

Polysecure by Jessica Fern; Eve Rickert (Foreword by); Nora Samaran (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781944934989
Publication Date: 2020-10-23
Attachment theory has entered the mainstream, but most discussions focus on how we can cultivate secure monogamous relationships. What if, like many people, you're striving for secure, happy attachments with more than one partner? Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern breaks new ground by extending attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy. Using her nested model of attachment and trauma, she expands our understanding of how emotional experiences can influence our relationships. Then, she sets out six specific strategies to help you move toward secure attachments in your multiple relationships. Polysecure is both a trailblazing theoretical treatise and a practical guide.
More Than Two by Franklin Veaux; Eve Rickert; Tatiana Gill (Illustrator); Janet Hardy (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780991399703
Publication Date: 2014-09-01
Can you love more than one person? Have multiple romantic partners, without jealousy or cheating? Absolutely! Polyamorous people have been paving the way, through trial and painful error. Now there's the new book More Than Two: A practical guide to ethical polyamory to help you find your own way.
The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton; Janet W. Hardy
ISBN: 9781587613371
Publication Date: 2009-03-10
The essential guide for singles and couples who want to explore polyamory in ways that are ethically and emotionally sustainable. For anyone who has ever dreamed of love, sex, and companionship beyond the limits of traditional monogamy, this groundbreaking guide navigates the infinite possibilities that open relationships can offer. Experienced ethical sluts Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy dispel myths and cover all the skills necessary to maintain a successful and responsible polyamorous lifestyle--from self-reflection and honest communication to practicing safe sex and raising a family. Individuals and their partners will learn how to discuss and honor boundaries, resolve conflicts, and to define relationships on their own terms.
Opening Up by Tristan Taormino
ISBN: 9781573442954
Publication Date: 2008-05-01
Relationship expert and bestselling author Tristan Taormino offers a bold new strategy for creating loving, lasting relationships. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over a hundred women and men, Opening Up explores the real-life benefits and challenges of all styles of open relationships -- from partnered non-monogamy to solo polyamory. With her refreshingly down-to-earth style and sharp wit, Taormino offers solutions for making an open relationship work, including tips on dealing with jealousy, negotiating boundaries, finding community, parenting and time management. Opening Up will change the way you think about intimacy.
Designer Relationships by Mark Michaels
ISBN: 9781627781497
Publication Date: 2015-09-08
Contemporary relationships are in a state of rapid evolution. These changes can and should empower people with the opportunity to develop partnerships based on their own sexualities, understandings, and agreements. This makes it possible to create what Kenneth Haslam, founder of the Kinsey Institute's Polyamory Archive, has called "designer relationships." Designer relationships may encompass: people who bond emotionally but not sexually; people who agree to be non-exclusive; single people who have occasional lovers or friends with benefits; multiple partner configurations where long-term bonds exist among all or some; partnerships in which people are kinky and that make room to explore kink.

Understanding Non-Monogamies by Meg Barker (Editor); Darren Langdridge (Editor)
ISBN: 9780415800556
Publication Date: 2009-12-08
Most social scientific work on intimate relationships has assumed a monogamous structure, or has considered anything other than monogamy only in the context of 'infidelity'. Yet, in recent years there has been a growing interest among researchers and the public in exploring various patterns of intimacy that involve open non-monogamy. This volume gathers contributions from academics, activists, and practitioners throughout the world to explore non-monogamous relationships. Featuring both empirical and theoretical pieces, contributors examine the history and cultural basis of various forms of non-monogamy, experiences of non-monogamous living, psychological understandings of relationship patterns, language and emotion, the discursive construction of mono-normativity as well as issues of race, class, disability, sexuality and gender.
Polyamory, monogamy, and American dreams : the stories we tell about poly lives and the cultural production of inequality by Mimi Schippers
ISBN: 9781138895034
Publication Date: 2019-11-13
This book introduces "the poly gaze" as a cultural tool to examine how representations of polyamory and poly lives reflect or challenge cultural hegemonies of race, class, gender, and nation. What role does monogamy play in American Identity, the American dream, and U.S. exceptionalism? How do the stories we tell about intimate relationships do cultural and ideological work to maintain and legitimize social inequalities along the lines of race, ethnicity, nation, religion, class, gender and sexuality? How might the introduction of polyamory or consensually non-monogamous relationships in the stories we tell about intimacy confound, disrupt or shift the meaning of what constitutes a good, American life?
Fraught Intimacies by Nathan Rambukkana
ISBN: 9780774828963
Publication Date: 2015-05-30
Adultery scandals involving politicians. Dating websites for married women and men. News reports on raids of polygamous communities. It seems that non-monogamy is everywhere: in popular culture, in the news, and before the courts. In Fraught Intimacies, Nathan Rambukkana delves into how polygamy, adultery, and polyamory are represented in the public sphere. His intricate analysis reveals how some forms of non-monogamy are tacitly accepted, even glamourized, while others are vilified and reviled. By questioning what this says about intimacy, power, and privilege, this book offers an innovative framework for understanding the status of non-monogamy in Western society.
Undoing Monogamy by Angela Willey
ISBN: 9780822374213
Publication Date: 2016-04-28
In Undoing Monogamy Angela Willey offers a radically interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of monogamy in U.S. science and culture, propelled by queer feminist desires for new modes of conceptualization and new forms of belonging. She approaches the politics and materiality of monogamy as intertwined with one another such that disciplinary ways of knowing themselves become an object of critical inquiry. Refusing to answer the naturalization of monogamy with a naturalization of nonmonogamy, Willey demands a critical reorientation toward the monogamy question in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
The Spectre of Promiscuity by Christian Klesse
ISBN: 9780754649069
Publication Date: 2007-11-28
Wide-ranging research suggests that partners in gay male and bisexual relationships do not necessarily expect monogamy, or see it as an important issue. Although the frequency of gay male and bisexual non-monogamous partnerships tends to be widely acknowledged in social science literature, these relationships have rarely been explored in more detail. By providing rich empirical data, thoughtful analysis and theoretical debate, this book makes a significant contribution to the sociological literature on sexual and intimate relationships. More specifically it explores the diversity of gay male and bisexual relationship practices in the context of heteronormative citizenship and intra-social movement conflict, and highlights the complexity of power relations that circumscribe queer people's relationships and sexual lives.
Beyond Monogamy by Mimi Schippers
ISBN: 9781479801596
Publication Date: 2016-08-16
A man and woman are in an open relationship. They have agreed that having sexual partners outside of their relationship is permissible. One night, when her partner is in another city, the woman has sex with the man's best friend. What does this mean for their relationship? More importantly, why is there such a strong cultural taboo against this kind of triangulation and what does it reveal about the social organization of gender and sexuality? In Beyond Monogamy, Mimi Schippers asks these and other questions to explore compulsory monogamy as a central feature of sexual normalcy. Schippers argues that compulsory monogamy promotes the monogamous couple as the only legitimate, natural, or desirable relationship form in ways that support and legitimize gender, race, and sexual inequalities. Through an investigation of sexual interactions and relationship forms that include more than two people, from polyamory, to threesomes, to the complexity of the 'down-low,' Schippers explores the queer, feminist, and anti-racist potential of non-dyadic sex and relationships. A serious look at the intersections of society and sexuality, Beyond Monogamy takes the reader on a compelling and accessible journey through compulsory monogamy, polyamory, and polyqueer sex and relationships.
The Handbook of Consensual Non-Monogamy: Affirming Mental Health Practice by Michelle D. Vaughan (Editor); Theodore R. Burnes (Editor)
ISBN: 9781538157121
Publication Date: 2022-07-15
This handbook provides perspectives across mental health disciplines on clinical work with consensual non-monogamous (CNM) people/relationships from a lens of power, privilege, and oppression. The authors provide a broad-based resource for clinicians, trainees, educators and supervisors in CNM-affirming care, addressing societal and internalized mononormativity and intersections with other forms of oppression (including ableism, racism, cisnormativity, classism). Educators using this volume will find foundational, current data on the experiences of CNM individuals and their relationships, as well as recent theory and empirical research relevant to CNM clients, including the importance of cultural humility within clinical practice. Key topics include developmental approaches to CNM, communities, families and relationships, queerness, emotional experiences, strengths/resilience, as well as ethical issues, training and organizational considerations in work with these clients, emphasizing practical recommendations, insights, and tools to promote CNM-affirming practice across settings.

Polyamory and Queer Anarchism: Infinite Possibilities for Resistance by Susan Song
Originally published in Published in Queering Anarchism: Essays on Gender, Power, and Desire edited by C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano, published by AK Press, 2012

Selection of online archives and other resources, which can be used to find further information on this topic

Kenneth R. Haslam Collection on Polyamory at the Kinsey Institute Library
The Kenneth R. Haslam, MD. collection consists of conference materials, internet resources, media coverage, and research articles, as well as Dr Haslam’s personal correspondence and papers originally delivered at poly-oriented meetings, sex research and sex therapy conferences.

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The bulk of the collection represents the work of Dr. Haslam and other poly-activists from 2000 to the present, with contributions from earlier polyamory writers and activists dating from the 1970s

Archives of Sexuality and Gender
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Provides access to materials exploring important aspects of LGBTQ life. Includes periodicals, newsletters, manuscripts, government records, organizational papers, correspondence, an international selection of posters, and other primary source materials.

Includes access to four modules: LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 1, LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 2, International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture, and L'Enfer de la Bibliotheque Nationale de France Digital Archive.
Sex & Sexuality
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Explores changing attitudes towards human sexuality, gender identities and sexual behaviors throughout the twentieth century. Produced in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collections, the resource includes the work of leading American sexologists, sex researchers, and organizations.

Users will be prompted to confirm that they are over the age of consent to access this resource. Please be aware that this resource contains material of a sexually explicit nature. Content includes, but is not limited to, descriptions and imagery of sexual violence; non-consensual sexual activity; sexual activity including minors; surgery and suicide.

Includes research papers and records spanning the tenures of the first three Institute directors; Dr Alfred C. Kinsey (1947-1956), Dr Paul H. Gebhard (1956-1982) and Dr June Reinisch (1982-1993).

RAD List of Relationship Anarchy Articles, Links, Resources
A list of articles, books, and other resources grew out of work that was started in Metro Detroit Polyamory's Relationship Anarchy discussion group in 2016. The list is focused on Relationship Anarchy, but includes articles on other non-monogamous relationship styles.
Consensual Non-monogamy Zotero Library
A collaborative Zotero library that brings together citations for a number of resources relating to consensual non-monogamy. Includes books, articles, blog posts, and more.

Blogs

The Critical Polyamorist
Kim TallBear's blog about polyamory, other forms of open non-monogamy, and their intersections with Indigeneity, race, and cultural politics in the US and Canada.
Conscious Polyamory: Loving More than One
A blog about polyamory emphasizing loving relationships, personal growth, and conscious evolution.

Podcasts

Queer Sex Ed
Queer Sex Ed is a podcast that centers queer and trans voices in conversations about sexual health. Many episodes cover topics related to non-monogamy.

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Queer Sex Ed is an imperative statement. When we call to "Queer" Sex Ed, it is a call-to-arms for sexual health educators, schools, parents, and people in all types of relationships to intentionally "queer" the institutions of sexual communication, sexual health, interpersonal relationships, and relationship structure.
Multiamory Podcast
Multiamory offers support and advice for modern relationships. Whether you are monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.
Polyamory Weekly
Poly Weekly is a podcast devoted to tales from the front of responsible non-monogamy from an inclusive, kink-friendly point of view. Every week, Minx, her cohosts and her guests discuss issues relating to communication, gender, race, sex, kink, manners, dating, family and time management, with perspectives from all around the globe.
All My Relations - Ep #5 Decolonizing Sex
All My Relations is a podcast hosted by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) to explore our relationships— relationships to land, to our creatural relatives, and to one another.

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Join AMR for a second discussion with Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Dr. Kim Tallbear on All My Relations. We'll explore Kim's “life project” of critical polyamory, her journey through feminism, her processes of writing in, with, and for community, and Kim treats us with some of her poetry, the “Critical polyamorist 100s”.

It's Called Polyamory by Tamara Pincus; Rebecca Hiles
ISBN: 9781944934422
Publication Date: 2017-10-06
Even in progressive families and communities, people who practice nonmonogamy are susceptible to misinformation and accusations of moral and emotional failings. Facing this requires its own coming out and education process. In this guide, Tamara Pincus and Rebecca Hiles provide a roadmap for explaining the expansive intricacies of the consensual nonmonogamy spectrum. By fusing personal experience and community research, they break down the various incarnations of polyamorous relationship structures, polyamory's intersections with race and gender, and the seemingly esoteric jargon of the lifestyle.
Love's Not Color Blind
ISBN: 9781944934477
Publication Date: 2018-03-30
The issues that make monogamous dating daunting for people of colorâshaming and exclusion by white partners, being fetishized, having realities of everyday racism ignoredâoccur in polyamorous relationships too, and trying "not to see race" only makes it worse. To make polyamorous communities inclusive, we must all acknowledge our part in perpetuating racism and listen to people of color. Love's Not Color Blind puts forward the frameworkâthrough research, anecdotal testimony, and analogyâfor understanding, identifying, and confronting racism within polyamorous communities.
Love in Abundance: a counselor's guide to open relationships by Kathy Labriola
ISBN: 9780937609477
Publication Date: 2011-06-01
Beyond the basics of polyamory lies a complex web of negotiations, agreements, pitfalls and rewards. Kathy Labriola, a relationships counselor who has worked for many years with singles, couples and groups in polyamorous and open relationships, sets forth some of the realities of alternative lifestyles: dealing with some of the common relationship-disrupters, managing jealousy, choosing compatible partners, combining BDSM with polyamory, distinguishing between sex addiction and polyamory, and much more.

Spotlight on Black LGBTQ+ Poetry

Black LGBTQ+ poets write from the intersections of Black and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer identities and experiences. Black LGBTQ+ poets explore issues of gender expression and discrimination, love, sex, sexuality, desire, culture, race, and more through their creative work. Due to compounding oppressions, the history of Black LGBTQ+ poetry and poetics has not been given adequate attention by scholars or mainstream audiences. What follows is a list of poetry books by Black LGBTQ+ poets, anthologies of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) poets who are LGBTQ+, and scholarly articles on the topic, in celebration of Black History Month. We have also included a very brief introduction to African American poetry and recommendations for further reading on that subject.

Poet Danez Smith reading "Genesissy" for Button Poetry, 2015

Next Steps
As with many of these national commemorations, one month is never enough time to fully honor and celebrate the history and culture of marginalized communities, let alone heal the legacies (and ongoing reality) of harm they've experienced. We recognize that there is much more to be done, that racism and anti-blackness can't be eliminated simply through the creation of resource guides, and that the work of realizing justice won't soon be over. But nevertheless, we keep trying, contributing how we can and building upon the efforts of those who came before us, and we continue to learn from and with one another.

If you'd like to engage more deeply with Black History Month, the IU Libraries Arts & Humanities department has created a number of interrelated resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of this remembering. You'll find those, below:

The Sound of Black History Month (Media Studies)
Black Philosophy & Thought (Philosophy)
In Memoriam: bell hooks (Philosophy)
Black American Poets and Poetry, 1770-Present (Literature)
Black Freedom Movements in American History (History)
Contemporary Black Playwrights You Should Know (Theatre & Drama)
Performance and Protest: Theatre, Politics, and Activism in America (Theatre & Drama)
Black History Month Streaming and DVD Resources (Media Services)

And for all things Black culture, you can never go wrong with the resources, services, and collections of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library.

Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
ISBN: 9781555977856
Publication Date: 2017-09-05
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus by Anaïs Duplan
ISBN: 9780986046186
Publication Date: 2017-09-01
"Reading Anaïs Duplan's chapbook, you realize you are more than an assemblage of ideologies, a cellular plan, or even an estranged, familial relation possessing the accoutrements of a melancholic nation, but also, too, the glorious product of dense, self-referential layered texts that call to the surface your loneliness and feelings of kinship. Here are poems that revel in post- hybridity and borderless threnodies, and go straight to the stillness of the heart, to performances of language that are fierce and juicier than a papaya, and frankly, that one would only expect from a brilliant, young mind as theirs."--Major Jackson
The New Testament by Jericho Brown
ISBN: 9781619321199
Publication Date: 2015-10-15
In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing--and the truth is coming on fast. Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. He currently teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Play Dead by Francine J. Harris
ISBN: 9781938584374
Publication Date: 2016-04-18
"This book talks smack. This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. . . . francine j. harris brilliantly ransacks the poet's toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind's eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work."
francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also Cave Canem fellow who has lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.
Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones
ISBN: 9781566893749
Publication Date: 2014-09-09
Prelude to Bruise is a song from a tightrope, balancing ecstatic existence and the chaos that always threatens to engulf a life on the margins. Danger is everywhere in these poems but it never overwhelms them; the poet is always on the other side of them, anchoring them. And his story carries us relentlessly along.
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
ISBN: 1555977588
Publication Date: 2016-10-11
Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters--half human and half something else. Donika Kelly's Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures--from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from "Out West" to "Back East." Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.
Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis
ISBN: 9780822981060
Publication Date: 2015-09-01
In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation--the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself--confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
Dub by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
ISBN: 9781478005414
Publication Date: 2020-02-14
The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.

The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Gloria T. Hull (Editor)
ISBN: 0195052528
Publication Date: 1988-04-14
Spanning the gamut of literary genres, from autobiographical short stories to poetry, journalism, and novelettes, this is a comprehensive collection of one of America's most seminal women writers.
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde
ISBN: 0393040909
Publication Date: 1997-09-01
A complete collection—over 300 poems—from one of this country's most influential poets.

"These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."—Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms—beautifully, forcefully—for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate."—Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving."—Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume."—Out Magazine
Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill
ISBN: 0452268176
Publication Date: 1992-06-01
Ceremonies offers provocative commentary on highly charged topics such as Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of African-American men, feminism among men, and AIDS in the black community.
Directed by Desire by June Jordan; Jan Heller Levi (Editor); Sara Miles (Editor); Adrienne Rich (Introduction by)
ISBN: 1556592280
Publication Date: 2005-10-01
Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan's 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs. As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power--of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value. . . . She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality." From These Poems These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? June Jordan taught at the University of California Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her 28 books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children's books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. Her numerous awards include a PEN West Freedom to Write Award and a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers Conference. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes; David Roessel (Editor); Arnold Rampersad
ISBN: 0679426310
Publication Date: 1994-11-15
A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni by Nikki Giovanni
ISBN: 9780060541330
Publication Date: 2003-11-25
For the first time ever, the complete poetry collection spanning three decades from Nikki Giovanni, renowned poet and one of America's national treasures. When her poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni immediately took her place among the most celebrated, controversial, and influential poets of the era. Now, more than thirty years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape. The first of its kind, this omnibus collection covers Nikki Giovanni's complete work of poetry from three decades, 1968-1998. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni contains Giovanni's first seven volumes of poetry: Black Feeling Black Talk, Black Judgement, Re: Creation, My House, The Women and the Men, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, and Those Who Ride the Night Winds. Arranged chronologically with a biographical timeline and introduction, a new afterword from the author, title and first-line indexes, and extensive notes to the poems, this collection is the testimony of a life's work -- from one of America's most beloved daughters and powerful poets.
Collected Poems by Robert Hayden; Reginald Dwayne Betts (Foreword by); Frederick Glaysher (Editor)
ISBN: 9780871406798
Publication Date: 2013-04-01
Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden's work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice--characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern--is a seminal one in American life and literature.

Here to Dare: 10 Gay Black Poets by Arthur T. Wilson
ISBN: 0962167525
Publication Date: 1992-07-01
A collection that reveals the acute and poignant double-consciousness of men born Black and gay, and their fierce determination to survive. - Amazon blurb
Nepantla by Christopher Soto (Editor)
ISBN: 9781937658786
Publication Date: 2018-05-01
The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United StatesIn 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!
Afrekete by Catherine E. McKinley
ISBN: 0385473559
Publication Date: 1995-04-01
An anthology of black lesbian writing. Twenty essays in prose and verse on subjects ranging from abortion to men's attitudes to family life.

Black Queer Studies: a critical anthology by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, editors.
ISBN: 9780822336181
Publication Date: 2005-11-01
While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project. The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies. Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace
No Tea, No Shade: new writings in Black queer studies by E. Patrick Johnson (Editor)
ISBN: 9780822362425
Publication Date: 2016-10-28
The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study. Topics include "raw" sex, pornography, the carceral state, gentrification, gender nonconformity, social media, the relationship between black feminist studies and black trans studies, the black queer experience throughout the black diaspora, and queer music, film, dance, and theater. The contributors both disprove naysayers who believed black queer studies to be a passing trend and respond to critiques of the field's early U.S. bias. Deferring to the past while pointing to the future, No Tea, No Shade pushes black queer studies in new and exciting directions. Contributors. Jafari S. Allen, Marlon M. Bailey, Zachary Shane Kalish Blair, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Cathy J. Cohen, Jennifer DeClue, Treva Ellison, Lyndon K. Gill, Kai M. Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kwame Holmes, E. Patrick Johnson, Shaka McGlotten, Amber Jamilla Musser, Alison Reed, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Tanya Saunders, C. Riley Snorton, Kaila Story, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Julia Roxanne Wallace, Kortney Ziegler
Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies by S. N. Nyeck (Editor)
ISBN: 9781138503472
Publication Date: 2019-12-20
This handbook offers diverse perspectives on queer Africa, incorporating scholarly contributions on themes that reflect and inflect the trajectories of queer contributions to African studies within and outside academia. The Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies incorporates a range of unique perspectives, reflecting ongoing struggles between regimes of inclusion and those of transformation premised upon different relational and reflexive engagements between queer embodiment and Africa's subjectivities. All sections of this handbook blend contributions from public intellectuals and practitioners with academic reflections on topics not limited to neoliberalism, social care, morality and ethics, social education, and technology, through the lens of queer African studies. The book renders visible the ongoing transformations and resistance within African societies as well as the inventiveness of queer presence in negotiating belonging. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality in Africa, queer studies, and African culture and society.

A very brief introduction to the African American / Black Poetic Tradition
African American poetry predates the written word and has its roots in a rich oral tradition. shares sonic qualities with Black musical forms like gospel, jazz, blues, hip-hop, and rap, and includes a rich array of poetic sound devices: alliteration, rhyme, anaphora (the repetition of lines or fragments), to name a few. Black Poetry can be about any theme or subject, but the Black experience is often at the center of Black Poetry, which is informed by the distinctiveness of Black culture. Black Poets often unpack and critiques the systemic oppressions and individual discriminations that they, as Black Americans, have endured, like slavery, segregation, and police brutality. Notable writers and movements in Black Poetry are described in the Power of Poetry series of blog posts from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Critics and supporters of the distinction between African American and American literature abound. The positions of each side are outlined in this wikipedia article on the subject.

Books and essays on African American poetry

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926).
June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America” (2002).

The Black Poets by Dudley Randall
ISBN: 0553275631
Publication Date: 1985-04-01
"The claim of The Black Poetsnbsp;nbsp;to being... an anthology is that itnbsp;nbsp;presents the full range of Black-American poetry,nbsp;nbsp;from the slave songs to the present day. It isnbsp;nbsp;important that folk poetry be included because it isnbsp;nbsp;the root and inspiration of later, literarynbsp;nbsp;poetry. Not only does this book present the full rangenbsp;nbsp;of Black poetry, but it presents most poets innbsp;nbsp;depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poetnbsp;nbsp;neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooksnbsp;nbsp;is represented not only by poems on racial andnbsp;nbsp;domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer ofnbsp;nbsp;superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models andnbsp;nbsp;retuming to their roots has freed Black poets tonbsp;nbsp;create a new poetry. This book records theirnbsp;nbsp;progress."--from the Introduction by Dudleynbsp;nbsp;Randall
Freedom Time by Anthony Reed
ISBN: 9781421415208
Publication Date: 2014-12-01
Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of black experimental writing that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow-era segregation. Histories of African American literature likewise have a hard time accounting for the distinctiveness of experimental writing, which is part of a general shift in emphasis among black writers away from appeals for social recognition or raising consciousness. In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed offers a theoretical reading of "black experimental writing" that presents the term both as a profound literary development and as a concept for analyzing how writing challenges us to rethink the relationships between race and literary techniques.
The Poetry of Black America by Arnold Adoff
ISBN: 0060200898
Publication Date: 1973-05-08
Renegade Poetics by Evie Shockley
ISBN: 9781609380588
Publication Date: 2011-10-28
Evie Shockley's Renegade Poetics separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century.

IU Resources

African American Poetry
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African American Poetry contains nearly 3,000 poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Provides a survey of the early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry Prince's 'Bars Fight', c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Twentieth-Century American Poetry
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Collection of poetry surveying the movements, schools, and voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. The collection includes 50,000 poems by over 300 poets.

Open Access Resources with African American Poetry Features

Lift Every Voice: 250 Years of African American Poetry: Includes a timeline, features on poets, videos, and virtual events & programming.
American Academy of Poets Black History Month feature
Poetry Foundation's Black History Month collection

Spotlight on Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Peoples

This page provides suggested resources (books, video & film, articles & databases) relevant to Two-Spirit Identity and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA) Indigenous Identity.

The term Two-Spirit (2S, 2Spirit, Two Spirit, Twospirited) was coined in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg. The term is a pan-Indian, umbrella term used by a number of Indigenous Native Americans to describe Native Peoples who fulfill traditional third-gender or variant-gender roles in their communities and cultures. The term is generally accepted but faces controversy from critics who consider it as reinforcing western notions of binary gender or attempting to erase terms that already exist in traditional communities for gender-variant members.

Acceptance, treatment, status, and rights of LGBTQIA Indigenous peoples and Two-Spirit individuals have varied historically. Contemporary understandings of Two-Spirit identity and what it means to be Indigenous and LGBTQIA vary greatly from tribe to tribe. We hope the resources collected in these pages will help readers gain a nuanced understanding of Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA Indigenous Identity.

In his talk, Nick Metcalf gives insight into his experiences being a two spirit, and explains why gender fluidity is necessary in today’s world.

About the Playlist
This mix features two-spirit and other Indigenous LGBTQIA and nonbinary/transgender artists from across Turtle Island, as well as other parts of the world. A work in progress, we welcome suggestions for artists from these groups for inclusion.

Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" (♡) button in the application to save.

To learn more about the artists and communities represented in this playlist, check out some of the resources we consulted:

Great Videos and Music from 8 Indigenous LGBTIA and/or Two Spirit Musicians (Indian Country Today)
6 Anthems by Queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous Artists to Pump You Up (WeRNative)
Decolonial love: These Indigenous artists are taking back the self-love that colonialism stole (CBC)
Pride Concert: A Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit Indigenous Showcase (University of Toronto SGDO)

Further Reading & Resources

Annotated Bibliography on LGBTQ/TwoSpirit Native Americans and First Nations People (ALA - GLBTRT)
How Indigenous Communities Can Support Two-Spirit People (Black Girl Dangerous)
8 Things You Should Know About Two Spirit People (Indian Country Today)
Indigenous Identity and the Significance of the Term "Two-Spirit" (them: inqueery)
12 Queer or 2 Spirit Artists to Celebrate on National Indigenous People's Day (YOHOMO)
Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures (PBS)

Next Steps
If you'd like to learn more about this month-long celebration of Indigenous communities and identity, we've created a guide with list of resources, as well as a playlist featuring Indigenous musicians, on the Media Studies Research Guide. There is also an overview of Indigenous Philosophy on the Philosophy Research Guide.

For more information about the Indigenous communities with ongoing and traditional ties to this land, and how to support Indigenous groups and movements, take a look at our Land Acknowledgment and Local Indigenous Resources guide.

Fiction

Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction by Joshua Whitehead (Editor)
ISBN: 9781551528113
Publication Date: 2020-10-20
A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed. This exciting and groundbreaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492. Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom.
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
ISBN: 9781551527253
Publication Date: 2018-05-15
'You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine' is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishises himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the 'rez,' and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages - and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
Food and Spirits by Beth Brant
ISBN: 0932379923
Publication Date: 1991-04-01
Eight stories deal with homecoming, endurance, loss, grief, tradition, and survival.
Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway
ISBN: 0806132361
Publication Date: 2000-05-01
One of Canada’s most celebrated authors and playwrights, Highway mixes humor with difficult subjects in his work ranging from Kiss of the Fur Queen, a coming-of-age novel that follows two Cree boys through residential school to adulthood, to The Rez Sisters, which is full of laughter as well as revelations about life. His essays have also featured in the collections Me Funny and Me Sexy, where he argues that his native language, Cree, is both the funniest and sexiest of all languages. (-Kai Minosh, BGDBlog)
Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time by Hope Nicholson (Editor); Richard Van Camp; Jeffrey Veregge (Artist); Nathan Adler; Gwen Benaway; Cherie Dimaline; Daniel Heath Justice; Cleo Keahna; Mari Kurisato; Darcie Little Badger; David Alexander Robertson
ISBN: 0993997074
Publication Date: 2016-09-30
Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters. These stories range from a transgender woman undergoing an experimental transition process to young lovers separated through decades and meeting in their own far future. These are stories of machines and magic, love and self-love.
Drowning in Fire by Craig S. Womack
ISBN: 0816521670
Publication Date: 2001-09-01
Josh Henneha has always been a traveler, drowning in dreams, burning with desires. As a young boy growing up within the Muskogee Creek Nation in rural Oklahoma, Josh experiences a yearning for something he cannot tame. Quiet and skinny and shy, he feels out of place, at once inflamed and ashamed by his attraction to other boys. Driven by a need to understand himself and his history, Josh struggles to reconcile the conflicting voices he hears--from the messages of sin and scorn of the non-Indian Christian churches his parents attend in order to assimilate, to the powerful stories of his older Creek relatives, which have been the center of his upbringing, memory, and ongoing experience. In his fevered and passionate dreams, Josh catches a glimpse of something that makes the Muskogee Creek world come alive. Lifted by his great-aunt Lucille's tales of her own wild girlhood, Josh learns to fly back through time, to relive his people's history, and uncover a hidden legacy of triumphs and betrayals, ceremonies and secrets he can forge into a new sense of himself. When as a man, Josh rediscovers the boyhood friend who first stirred his desires, he realizes a transcendent love that helps take him even deeper into the Creek world he has explored all along in his imagination. Interweaving past and present, history and story, explicit realism and dreamlike visions, Craig Womack's Drowning in Fire explores a young man's journey to understand his cultural and sexual identity within a framework drawn from the community of his origins. A groundbreaking and provocative coming-of-age story, Drowning in Fire is a vividly realized novel by an impressive literary talent.
Rough Paradise by Alec Butler
ISBN: 9781927443620
Publication Date: 2014-05-31
Born with an Intersex condition in a rough, working-class city, the harassment and hate Terry Tomey experiences for being bi-gendered and Two-Spirit drives them to the brink of suicide--yet they are saved by the love and acceptance of Darla. The two incur the wrath of their families and their community as they fall in love and graphically explore their queer sexuality. Forcefully separated, they spend the next twenty years trying to find each other and to uncover the real truth as to why they were kept apart.

Poetry

Feed by Tommy Pico
ISBN: 9781947793576
Publication Date: 2019-11-05
Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.
Fire Power by Chrystos
ISBN: 088974047X
Publication Date: 1995-09-01
Eloquent words are Chrystos's tool for survival and her weapon in fighting for social justice. "Chrystos is writing a poetry which indeed changes the world." -Lambda Book Report
This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781452962238
Publication Date: 2019-09-03
The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man--available for the first time in the United States "i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative." Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is "a prayer against breaking," writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. "By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we've been waiting for." Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay." Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
My Woman Card Is Anti-Native, and Other Two-Spirit Truths by Xemiyulu Tapepechul
ISBN: 9781729873472
Publication Date: 2018-12-02
"My Woman Card is anti-Native & Other Two-Spirit Truths" is a book of free verse poems, haikus and sonnets inspired by a conversation with the Legendary Venus Selenite, by the author's love for classical theatre, by her connection to her community, and by her experiences navigating eurocentrism in medicine & social life.
Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway
ISBN: 9781771664394
Publication Date: 2018-09-01
In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans women in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.
Witness, I Am by Gregory Scofield
ISBN: 9780889713239
Publication Date: 2016-10-01
Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada's most recognized poets. The first part of the book, "Dangerous Sound," contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. "Muskrat Woman," the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, "Ghost Dance," raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield's poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From "Killer," Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: "I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you."
Prayers for My 17th Chromosome by Amir Rabiyah
ISBN: 9781943977420
Publication Date: 2017-11-14
"Amir Rabiyah is a magician who has tasted salt of the creation story's sea. The cleaving of human to spirit found in Prayers for My 17th Chromosome is a blood tangle that will kiss your cells till you sweat / constellations. Rabiyah reminds their reader that to exist in between boxes of national belongings, migrations, queer kinships, and disability is not to swallow war. Rather, in these verses, complications find respite in one another, [becoming] the endless, / the source, / the horizon / awakening." - Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd's Son and The Taxidermist's Cut
Full-Metal Indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead
ISBN: 9781772011876
Publication Date: 2017-11-28
This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. They dazzlingly and fiercely take on the likes of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Milton while also not forgetting contemporary pop culture figures such as Lana Del Rey, Grindr, and Peter Pan. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time - they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. "Do not read me as a vanished ndn," they ask, "read me as a ghastly one." full-metal indigiqueer is influenced by the works of Jordan Abel, Tanya Tagaq, Daniel Heath Justice, Claudia Rankine, Vivek Shraya, Qwo-Li Driskill, Leanne Simpson, Kent Monkman, and Donna Haraway. It is a project of resurgence for Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and hi/story - the very lives of Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer youth are rarely mentioned (and even dispossessed in our very mandates for reconciliation), our lives are precarious but they too are precious. We find ourselves made spectral in settler and neocolonial Indigenous nationalisms - if reconciliation is a means of "burying the hatchet," Zoa seeks to unearth the bones buried with those hatched scalps and perform a séance to ghost dance Indigiqueerness into existence. Zoa world-destroys in order to world-build a new space - they care little for reconciliation but rather aim to reterroritorialize space in literature, pop culture, and oral storytelling. This project follows in the tradition of the aforementioned authors who, Whitehead believes, utilize deconstruction as a means of decolonization. This is a sex-positive project that tirelessly works to create coalition between those who have, as Haraway once noted, "been injured, profoundly." Zoa stands in solidarity with all qpoc folk who exist as ghosts with intergenerational and colonial phantom pains - they sing with Donna Summer, RuPaul, Effie White, and Trixie Mattel. The space made is a post-apocalyptic hub of sex and decolonization - a world where making love is akin to making live.
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
ISBN: 9781941040638
Publication Date: 2017-05-09
Nature Poem follows Teebs--a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet--who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he's adamant--bratty, even--about his distaste for the word "natural," over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the "natural world," he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

Drama

Two-Spirit Acts by Jean O'Hara (Editor); Waawaate Fobister; Muriel Miguel; Kent Monkman
ISBN: 9781770911840
Publication Date: 2014-04-15
With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.

Essays

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781937512934
Publication Date: 2020-07-14
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness. Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
Living the Spirit: a gay American Indian anthology by Will Roscoe (Editor)
ISBN: 0312018991
Publication Date: 1988-08-01
A groundbreaking collection of essays and stories by, about, and selected by gay American Indians from over twenty North American tribes.
she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two-spirit story) by Sharron Proulx-Turner
ISBN: 9780888013262
Publication Date: 2008
In she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two spirit story), Sharron Proulx-Turner combines poetry and history to delve into the little-known lives of two-spirit women. Regarded with both wonder and fear when first encountered by the West, First Nations women living with masculine and feminine principles in the same body had important roles to play in society, as healers and visionaries, before they were suppressed during the colonial invasion. She walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two-spirit story) creatively juxtaposes first-person narratives and traditional stories with the voices of contemporary two-spirit women, voices taken from nature and the teachings of Water, Air, Fire and Mother Earth. The author restores the reputation of two-spirit woman that had been long under attack from Western culture as she re-appropriates the lives of these individuals from the writings of Western anthropologists and missionaries. (From Turnstone Press)
Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature by Qwo-Li Driskill (Editor); Daniel Heath Justice (Editor); Deborah Miranda (Editor); Lisa Tatonetti (Editor)
ISBN: 9780816502424
Publication Date: 2011-10-01
Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book's publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today's Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century.

Memoirs

Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda
ISBN: 9781597142014
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
This beautiful and devastating book--part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir--should be required reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.
Forty-Three Septembers by Jewelle Gomez
ISBN: 1563410370
Publication Date: 1993-12-01
A collection of autobiographical essays about identity, the author's family, growing up and growing older, and related topics.
One Bead at a Time by Beverly Little Thunder; Sharron Proulx-Turner
ISBN: 9781771332651
Publication Date: 2016-06-25
One Bead at a Timeis the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada. Transcribed and edited by two-spirit M#65533;tis writer Sharron Proulx-Turner, Little Thunder's narrative is told verbatim, her melodious voice and keen sense of humour almost audible overtop of the text on the page. Early in her story, Little Thunder recounts a dream from her early adulthood, "I stared at these lily pads for the longest time and I decided that there was one part of the pond that had lots of lily pads and no frogs. I said, 'I want to go there because there's lots of lily pads but no frogs and I like creating community.'" And create community she does. Little Thunder established the first and today, the only all-women's Sundance in the world, securing a land base in the Green Mountains of Vermont for future generations of Indigenous women's ceremony. She was active in the A.I.M. movement and she continues to practice and promote political and spiritual awareness for Indigenous women around the world. A truly remarkable visionary.
Thunder Through My Veins by Gregory Scofield
ISBN: 9780385692748
Publication Date: 2019-09-10
Born into a Metis family of Cree, Scottish, English and French descent but never told of his heritage, Gregory Scofield knew he was different. His father disappeared after he was born, and at five he was separated from his mother and sent to live with strangers and extended family. Only his love for his sensitive but battered mother and his Aunty Georgina, a neighbor who befriended him, kept him alive. This is Gregory's traumatic, tender and hopeful story of his fight to rediscover and accept himself in the face of a heritage with diametrically opposed backgrounds.
A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby; Mary Louisa Plummer (As told to)
ISBN: 9780887558122
Publication Date: 2016-04-22
A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery."A Two-Spirit Journey" is Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby's story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism. As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay.Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.

Featured Videos

"In this series for News Talk Radio's Meeting Ground we take the journey of indigenous gender identity tracing gender diverse First Nations people (or Two-Spirit) through their lives pre contact and then after residential schools. We learn what that journey means for the future of Two-Spirit people on Turtle Island today." – Kelly Malone

"In this webinar, three indigenous community leaders discuss their work and how it benefits the communities in which they live. They focus on how their identity as Two Spirits has influenced their activism, art, scholarly work, and vision. The webinar is presented by Rep. Susan Allen, LaDonna BlueEye, and Isaiah Brokenleg, and moderated by Sharon M. Day." - SAMHSA

Documentaries

2 Spirits: Native Lesbians and Gay Men by Teresa Osa Hidalgo de la Riva
Call Number: Streaming
Publication Date: 1994
2-Spirited people (Native lesbians and Gay men) from the Bay Area share their experience of overlapping gender, ethnic and cultural identities as they explore and define their visions of utopia
Two Spirits by Lydia Nibley
Call Number: Wells Library - Media Services - DVDs
Publication Date: 2009
Examines the role of two-spirit people in the Navajo culture in the context of the story of a gay youth named Fred Martinez. Martinez was a nádleehí or a male-bodied person with a feminine essence, who was murdered in a hate crime at the age of sixteen. Discusses the traditional Native American perspective on gender and sexuality and the need for a balanced interrelationship between the feminine and masculine.
Two Spirits by Ruth Fertig
Call Number: Streaming
Publication Date: 2007
Joey Criddle, a Native American gay man, recounts the story of how he underwent a transformation from a closeted Pentecostalist in Mississippi to the co-director of the Two Spirit Society of Denver.
Byron Chief-Moon: Grey Horse Rider by Philip Szporer & Marlene Millar
Call Number: Streaming
Publication Date: 2007
Byron Chief-Moon, Grey Horse Rider: Father of three, successful TV actor and artist and proud member of the First Nations two-spirited gay community, Byron Chief-Moon is a fascinating mesh of dynamic personae. But when he dances alone in the forest, the complexity of the real world washes away, and we can see his spiritual self take hold. Interviews combine with mesmerizing footage of his performances to capture the essence of this cutting-edge artist who founded the Coyote Arts Percussive Performance Association. By melding the history and art of his Canadian Blackfoot Confederacy tribe with issues of contemporary life, Chief-Moon's work makes profound statements about identity and tradition.
Water Flowing Together by Gwendolen Cates
Call Number: Streaming
Publication Date: 2008
Offers an intimate portrait of a remarkable dancer, Jock Soto, who retired from the New York City Ballet at age forty, after a twenty-four-year career. Soto's journey as an openly gay man of Navajo Indian and Puerto Rican descent provides a rare glimpse into the life of a dancer and the disparate worlds which shaped this important artist. Soto was asked to join the New York City Ballet by George Balanchine at sixteen after first studying at the affiliated School of American Ballet on a full scholarship.
Kumu Hina by Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson
Call Number: Streaming
Publication Date: 2013
Imagine a world where a little boy can grow up to be the woman of his dreams, and a young girl can rise to become a leader among men. Welcome to Kumu Hina's Hawai'i. During a momentous year in her life in modern Honolulu, Hina Wong-Kalu, a native Hawaiian māhū, or transgender, teacher uses traditional culture to inspire a student to claim her place as leader of the school's all-male hula troupe. But despite her success as a teacher, Hina longs for love and a committed relationship. Will her marriage to a headstrong Tongan man fulfill her dreams? An incredible docu-drama that unfolds like a narrative film, KUMU HINA reveals a side of Hawai'i rarely seen on screen.
Being Thunder by (directed by) Stéphanie Lamorré
Publication Date: 2021
Sherenté, a Two Spirit Genderqueer teenager from Rhode Island's Narragansett tribe performs in dance competitions at annual regional powwows of New England tribes. There is no formal rule which prohibits Two Spirit Genderqueer people from competing in a category different from their birth gender. Wearing female fancy shawl regalia, Sherenté dances with joy and beauty. Behind the scenes, tribal leaders manipulate Sherenté's scores or disqualify them outright because of their belief in traditional binary gender roles. Blindsided by ongoing dishonesty and deception, Sherenté continues to perform in spite of insensitive behavior by tribal leaders and others in their community. Sherenté's enduring courage and self-respect are met with an outpouring of support from family, powwow attendees, and fellow competitors.

Feature Films

The business of fancydancing by Sherman Alexie
Call Number: Wells Library - Media Services - DVDs
Publication Date: 2002
Former Spokane Reservation best friends, Seymour and Aristotle have taken different paths when they are brought together for the funeral of an old friend. Both went off to college; one is now a successful poet, the other returned home embittered. Tensions and resentments flare as they meet again.
Johnny Greyeyes by Jorge Manuel Manzano
Call Number: Auxiliary Library Facility - Media Item
Publication Date: 2000
Johnny Greyeyes is a powerful story of a Native American woman struggling to maintain strength, love and spirit. Since the shooting death of her father, Johnny has spent most of her life in prison. There, she forms a new family and falls in love with her cellmate Lana.
Drunktown's Finest by Sydney Freeland
Call Number: Wells Library - Media Services - Video Browsing
Publication Date: 2015
Three young Native Americans - an adopted Christian girl, a rebellious father-to-be, and a promiscuous transsexual - strive to escape the hardships of life on an Indian reservation.
Wildhood by Bretten Hannam
Publication Date: 2021
In a rural east-coast trailer park, Link lives with his toxic father and younger half-brother Travis. When Link discovers his Mi’kmaw mother could still be alive, it lights a flame and they make a run for a better life. On the road they meet Pasmay, a pow wow dancer drawn to Link. As the boys journey across Mi’kma’ki, Link finds community, identity, and love in the land where he belongs.

Short Films

Aviliaq:Entwined - Short film by Inuk filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, as part of the Embargo Project. In the 1950s, two Inuit women attempt to protect their relationship when pressure from their new colonial culture forces them to marry men.
"I Still Believe" - Short film by Raven Davis about love, hope and wonder
"It's Not Your Fault" - Short movie by Raven Davis about the violence of online comments made towards Indigenous people, specifically Indigenous Women, children and 2 Spirit people. Bringing attention to the negligence of online/social media outlets allowing hate speech in Canada.
"Mars-Womb-Man" - short film by James Diamond. Man from Venus (super 8, 4 min, 1998) meets Mars Womb-Man. She's an answer without a question and he a question without answer. A sustainable foreground emerges only when they forge paths. A motion portrait where opposites distract and the peripheral rule is born.
"Meskanahk (My Path)" - 'Meskanahk' is a video narrative of a young 'half-breed' man's journey off a Cree reserve. This video highlights the motivations that progressed his journey and the questions, regrets and fears raised on his path from childhood to adulthood. 'Meskanahk' chronicles the plight of this young man's fears of being in situations where he was always labeled as an: 'other', and how this had propelled him to run from situation to situation. In the end, when this young man stops running, he wonders if his parents hate him for having run away.
The Misadventures of Pussy Boy - series of animated shorts by Alec Butler, featuring Alick, a trans/2spirit/intersex teen, going on various misadventures
Thirza Cuthand - collection of short films by queer transgender Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand
Two-Spirit & Queer (NFB) - Collection of films by Indigenous two-spirit and queer filmmakers, from the National Film Board of Canada

Other Online Videos

21st International Two Spirit Gathering Powwow - footage is of the Grand Entry of the 21 International Two-Spirit Gathering held at Aspen Lodge in Estes Park Colorado, for the Two-Spirit Society of Denver
As They Are: Two-Spirit People in the Modern World - 20 minute film by Mike Garrido and Tarek Tohme featuring Elton Naswood (Navajo), Ben Lucero Wolf (Kiowa), and Richard Eric Dearmore (Paiute)
C2C: Two Spirit and Queer People of Colour Conference - C2C: Two Spirit & Queer People of Colour Call to Conversation with LGBT & Allies" met from Friday, October 20 to Sunday, October 22, 2017 at The University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba. C2C was hosted by the University of Winnipeg (UW) in partnership with Two-Spirit People of Manitoba and QTPOC Winnipeg
The Candy Show - The Candy Show is a National variety TV series featuring the Aboriginal Comedian Candy Palmater and her music guest and a Performing artist on each episode.
Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities - Author and Indigenous elder Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities
Our Families: LGBT / Two Spirit Native American Stories - We all go through some of the same struggles: we struggle to access healthy food, quality education, and affordable healthcare. These struggles affect Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) families of color in very unique ways. This Our Families video features Native LGBT/Two Spirit families sharing their personal stories of struggle, acceptance, and family.
Queer Profiles: Alec Butler (Cathexis LGBTQ Oral History) - In this fascinating interview, award-winning filmmaker, playwright and 2spirit/trans/intersex activist Alec Butler shares his story of growing up queer in Cape Breton and being drawn to art as a way of getting through decades of questioning his identity and gender.
Two Spirit (Injunuity) - Two Spirit: A person of First Nations or Native American descent possessing both a male and female spirit. An umbrella term used to describe the fluidity of First Nations/Native American gender identity and sexuality with respect to traditional tribal roles. Featuring: Mica Valdez (Mexica), Nazbah Tom (Navajo/Diné), Arlando Teller (Navajo/Diné), Charlie Ballard (Anishinaabe, Sac & fox), Esther Lucero (Navajo/Diné).
Two Spirit People - An overview of historical and contemporary Native American concepts of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation. This documentary explores the berdache tradition in Native American culture, in which individuals who embody feminine and masculine qualities act as a conduit between the physical and spiritual world, and because of this are placed in positions of power within the community.

Streaming Resources

Ethnographic Video Online
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Contains classic and contemporary documentaries, previously unpublished footage from anthropologists and ethnographers working in the field, and some feature films. Includes searchable transcripts.

Access is for Volumes 1-4.

Ethnographic Video Online, Vols. I and II: Foundational Films
Includes classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent.

Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. III: Indigenous Voices
Includes films by indigenous filmmakers. Emphasis is on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.

Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. IV: Festivals and Archives
Includes titles by contemporary visual anthropologists. Also contains the full catalog of anthropology films from Berkeley Media, formerly known as the University of California’s Extension Center for Media.
Kanopy Streaming Video
- This link opens in a new window
Kanopy Streaming Video gathers streaming videos from a variety of producers and makes them available to students. Faculty and instructors may request titles for purchase by the Libraries via the Kanopy Streaming Video site. Priority access will be given to faculty and instructors for class use.

Academic Texts

Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill
ISBN: 9780816533640
Publication Date: 2016-04-01
In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men's and women's roles or who mix men's and women's roles. Asegi, which translates as "strange," is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to "queer." For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered "strange" by colonial heteropatriarchy. As the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous Queer or Two-Spirit critique, Asegi Stories examines gender and sexuality in Cherokee cultural memory, how they shape the present, and how they can influence the future. The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Asegi Stories derive from activist, artistic, and intellectual genealogies, referred to as "dissent lines" by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Driskill intertwines Cherokee and other Indigenous traditions, women of color feminisms, grassroots activisms, queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric, Native studies, and decolonial politics. Drawing from oral histories and archival documents in order to articulate Cherokee-centered Two-Spirit critiques, Driskill contributes to the larger intertribal movements for social justice.
Erotics of Sovereignty: queer native writing in the era of self-determination by Mark Rifkin
ISBN: 9780816677825
Publication Date: 2012-04-18
In 1970 the Nixon administration inaugurated a new era in federal Indian policy. No more would the U.S. government seek to deny and displace Native peoples or dismantle Native governments; from now on federal policy would promote "the Indian's sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community." In The Erotics of Sovereignty, Mark Rifkin offers a telling perspective on what such a policy of self-determination has meant and looks at how contemporary queer Native writers use representations of sensation to challenge official U.S. accounts of Native identity. Rifkin focuses on four Native writers--Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Esselen), Greg Sarris (Graton Rachería), and Chrystos (Menominee)--approaching their fiction and poetry as forms of political theory. Rifkin shows how the work of these queer or two-spirit Native writers affirms the significance of the erotic as an exercise of individual and community sovereignty. In this way, we come to see how their work contests the homophobic, sexist, and exclusivist policies and attitudes of tribal communities as well as those of the nation-state.
Queer Indigenous Studies: critical interventions in theory, politics, and literature by Qwo-Li Driskill (Editor); Chris Finley (Editor); Scott Lauria Morgensen (Editor); Brian Joseph Gilley (Editor)
ISBN: 9780816529070
Publication Date: 2011-03-15
"This book is an imagining." So begins this collection examining critical, Indigenous-centered approaches to understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) lives and communities and the creative implications of queer theory in Native studies. This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogue--a "writing in conversation"--among a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few. Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms. Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people "experience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival," this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in allied resistance working toward positive change.
Spaces Between Us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization by Scott Lauria Morgensen
ISBN: 9780816656325
Publication Date: 2011-11-17
We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of "Native" and "settler" define the status of being "queer," Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society. Morgensen's analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people. Presenting a "biopolitics of settler colonialism"--in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers--Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.
Becoming Two-Spirit: gay identity and social acceptance in Indian country by Brian Joseph Gilley
ISBN: 0803271263
Publication Date: 2006-10-01
The Two-Spirit man occupies a singular place in Native American culture, balancing the male and the female spirit even as he tries to blend gay and Native identity. The accompanying ambiguities of gender and culture come into vivid relief in the powerful and poignant Becoming Two-Spirit, the first book to take an in-depth look at contemporary American Indian gender diversity. Drawing on a wealth of observations from interviews, oral histories, and meetings and ceremonies, Brian Joseph Gilley provides an intimate view of how Two-Spirit men in Colorado and Oklahoma struggle to redefine themselves and their communities. The Two-Spirit men who appear in Gilley's book speak frankly of homophobia within their communities, a persistent prejudice that is largely misunderstood or misrepresented by outsiders. Gilley gives detailed accounts of the ways in which these men modify gay and Native identity as a means of dealing with their alienation from tribal communities and families. With these compromises, he suggests, they construct an identity that challenges their alienation while at the same time situating themselves within contemporary notions of American Indian identity. He also shows how their creativity is reflected in the communities they build with one another, the development of their own social practices, and a national network of individuals linked in their search for self and social acceptance.
Identities and Place: changing labels and intersectional communities of LGBTQ and two-spirit people in the United States by Katherine Crawford-Lackey (Editor); Megan E. Springate (Editor)
ISBN: 9781789204797
Publication Date: 2019-11-01
With a focus on historic sites, this volume explores the recent history of non- heteronormative Americans from the early twentieth century onward and the places associated with these communities. Authors explore how queer identities are connected with specific places: places where people gather, socialize, protest, mourn, and celebrate. The focus is deeper look at how sexually variant and gender non-conforming Americans constructed identity, created communities, and fought to have rights recognized by the government. Each chapter is accompanied by prompts and activities that invite readers to think critically and immerse themselves in the subject matter while working collaboratively with others.
Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community by Andrew J. Jolivétte
ISBN: 9780295998503
Publication Date: 2016-06-01
Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary "Lammy" Award in LGBTQ Studies The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco's two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.
Reclaiming Two-Spirits: sexuality, spiritual renewal, & sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers; Raven E. Heavy Runner (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780807003466
Publication Date: 2022-04-26
A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí'skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism's written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed--and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.
The Spirit and the Flesh: sexual diversity in American Indian culture by Walter L. Williams
ISBN: 0807046159
Publication Date: 1992-04-01
Walter L. Williams's excellent research has produced one of the most extensive studies of the berdache culture among Native Americans. Unlike the larger American society, Native Americans historically have respected, and in many tribal nations venerated, homosexuals. Williams explains the berdache as a custom, its social roles, and the berdache history, including its introduction to the European concept of sin and intolerance of sexual diversity. The word berdache applies almost exclusively to males, mainly because historical records only relate dealings with aboriginal males, but Williams also includes a chapter on female sexual diversity, using the word amazon to describe these often warriorlike women. Authors note: "Shortly after the second revised edition this book was published in 1992, the term "Two-Spirit Person" became more popular among native people than the older anthropological term "berdache." When I learned of this new term, I began strongly supporting the use of this newer term. I believe that people should be able to call themselves whatever they wish, and scholars should respect and acknowledge their change of terminology. I went on record early on in convincing other anthropologists to shift away from use of the word berdache and in favor of using Two-Spirit. Nevertheless, because this book continues to be sold with the use of berdache, many people have assumed that I am resisting the newer term. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unless continued sales of this book will justify the publication of a third revised edition in the future, it is not possible to rewrite what is already printed, Therefore, I urge readers of this book, as well as activists who are working to gain more respect for gender variance, mentally to substitute the term "Two-Spirit" in the place of "berdache" when reading this text."

Selected Scholarly Articles

Driskill, Q-L. (2011). Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(1) pp. 69-92.
Hames-García, M. (2013). What's After Queer Theory? Queer Ethnic and Indigenous Studies. Feminist Studies 39(2), pp. 384-404
Robinson, M. (2020). Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity. Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 67, no. 12, pp. 1675–1690.
Robinson, M. (2017). Two-Spirit and Bisexual People: Different Umbrella, Same Rain. Journal of Bisexuality, 17(1), 7–29.
Morgensen, S. L. (2011). Unsettling Queer Politics: What Can Non-Natives Learn from Two-Spirit Organizing? In Q.-L. Driskill, C. Finley, B. J. Gilley, & S. L. Morgensen (Eds.), Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (pp. 132–152).
Lang, S. (2016). Native American men-women, lesbians, two-spirits: Contemporary and historical perspectives. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 20(3/4), 299–323.
Kongerslev, Marianne. (2018). Dance to the Two-Spirit. Mythologizations of the Queer Native. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 27(4).
Greensmith, C., & Giwa, S. (2013). Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics: Settler Homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit Subjectivities. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, 37(2), 129–148.

Suggested Keywords for database searches relating to Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous* identity:
*while there is some overlap and commonalities in understandings of gender and sexuality across groups, when doing research relevant to Indigenous identities, it is always best practice to search using the names of individual tribes, nations, and communities when possible

Indigenous

Aboriginal

Native

First Nations

Race

POC (people of color)

BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color)

Queer

Gay

Lesbian

Bisexual

Transgender

Identity

Sexuality

Sexual Orientation

Two-spirit (sometimes "two spirit", "two spirited" or "two-spirited")

LGBT

LGBTQ

LGBTQ2S

Gender Studies

Gender

Colonial(ism)

Decolonial(ism)

Decolonizing

Relevant Databases

Academic Search (EBSCO)
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Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.

This multi-disciplinary database provides full-text for more than 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,700 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
Alternative Press Index
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Bibliographic database of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles from international alternative, radical, and leftist periodicals.

Focus is on the practice and theory of socialism, national liberation, labor, indigenous peoples, LGBT, feminism, ecology, democracy, and anarchism.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender
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Provides access to materials exploring important aspects of LGBTQ life. Includes periodicals, newsletters, manuscripts, government records, organizational papers, correspondence, an international selection of posters, and other primary source materials.

Includes access to four modules: LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 1, LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 2, International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture, and L'Enfer de la Bibliotheque Nationale de France Digital Archive.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America
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Bibliographic database covering all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America. Includes more than 350,000 citations for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books, reviews, and trade publications from the United States and Canada with expanded content from Great Britain and Australia.

This resource covers a wide range of topics including acculturation, archaeology, education, Ethnohistory, and economic development, folklore, the gaming industry, missions, mythology, religion, and tribal governments.
Gender: Identity and Social Change
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Primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. Includes sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.

Material has been sourced from across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Key areas represented in the material include: employment and labor, education, government and legislation, the body, domesticity and the family. Includes records from men’s and women’s organisations and pressure groups, detailing twentieth-century lobbying and activism on a wide array of issues to reveal developing gender relations and prevalent challenges.
Gender Studies Database
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Citations to articles, books, conference papers, pamphlets, dissertations and other publications about women and feminism, women's studies and men's studies.
GenderWatch
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Full text database with a focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas.
Indigenous Peoples of North America
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Covers the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada. The archive includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals and photographs.
LGBTQ+ Library Catalog
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The LGBTQ+ Library Catalog contains materials pertaining to asexual, bisexual, gay, intersex, lesbian, transgender, and queer issues. These resources include books, videos, CDs, and periodicals. This collection is intended to be a resource for both research and entertainment.

The LGBTQ+ Library provides lending services to the entire community; anyone can register to become a patron with a photo ID.
LGBTQ+ Source
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Index citations and selected full-text literature in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies
LGBTQ+ Source
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Index citations and selected full-text literature in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies
LGBT Thought and Culture
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LGBT Thought and Culture is an online resource hosting books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day.

Online Resources
Selection of resources freely available online

Queer Indigenous Poetics (ANMLY)

Academic Style & Gender-Inclusive Writing

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Academic style guides agree: honoring and using a person’s correct personal pronoun is a matter of respect, and it's good style

All three major Academic Style Guides (APA, the Chicago Manual of Style, and MLA) agree that a person’s correct personal pronouns (they, he, she, etc.) should be respected and used at all times in formal and academic writing. It is not possible to infer a person’s pronouns just by looking at them. To determine the pronouns of someone you are writing about, refer to their biography, or if possible, ask them what personal pronouns they use. If their personal pronouns are unknown or cannot be determined, using singular “they” may be the solution, if you are writing in APA or MLA. For those using Chicago, the guide recommends rewriting the text in a way that does not require using personal pronouns (Chicago, 5.255). Always take care in your writing to use the correct personal pronouns. Never assume a person’s pronouns when writing about them.

More about personal pronouns and how to use them

In English, personal pronouns are gendered. Historically, English offers only three personal pronouns: masculine (he), feminine (she), and the un-gendered “it” (which is widely seen as rude or disrespectful to use when referring to a person). These few personal pronouns do not adequately express the variety of gender expressions that have been present throughout history. Grammar is not static, but changes over time, adapting to, reflecting and perpetuating biases and social constructs present in the culture. Many people have been excluded by this rigid and artificial binary representation of gender codified in the English language and have had to find or create alternatives to identify themselves in speech and writing.

Below is a chart that lists some of the most commonly used personal pronouns and gives examples for how to use them.

This pronoun chart is directly based off of one created by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Gender & Sexuality Campus Center.
	Nominative (subject)	Objective (object)	Possessive determiner	Possessive pronoun	Reflexive
He	He laughed	I called him	His dog barks	That is his	He likes himself
She	She laughed	I called her	Her dog barks	That is hers	She likes herself
They	They laughed	I called them	Their dog barks	That is theirs	They like themself
Per	Per laughed	I called per	Per dog barks	That is pers	Per likes perself
Ze/Hir (Zee/Hear)	Ze laughed	I called hir	Hir dog barks	That is hirs	Ze likes hirself

Academic Style Guides on the importance of achieving gender-neutral writing

Academic style guides agree on the importance of achieving gender-neutral writing, and the problem of using “he” as a universal pronoun. For a time, academic style guides suggested the use of “he or she” or alternating between “he” or “she” in writing. This construction is now acknowledged as being not only clunky and awkward, but exclusionary because to use “he or she” suggests a rigid gender binary, excluding all persons whose gender identities are outside of that binary. Luckily, singular “they,” in use since the 14th century in informal and spoken speech, has started to gain traction as a gender-inclusive pronoun to refer to a person of unknown gender in formal and academic writing. More on the history of singular “they” can be found at the Oxford English Dictionary’s website and Historians.org.

In 2021 Academic Style Guides are divided on the use of singular “they” as a gender-neutral unknown referent

Academic Style Guides adapt slowly to changes in grammar, and like grammar, are socially constructed texts that are constantly in flux. To understand Academic Style Guides’ current and past positions on singular “they” as a gender-neutral unknown referent, it is important to keep in mind that Academic Style Guides do not create grammatical rules. Rather, they establish formal guidelines that follow spoken and grammatical conventions which are set by informal writing and speech. Academic Style Guides are often slow to adopt conventions they might see as temporary. Despite the long history of singular “they” in this usage, which mirrors the grammatical evolution of singular “you,” some style guides have waffled on sanctioning its use.

As of 2021, all three major guides (APA, MLA, and Chicago) acknowledge the ubiquity of singular “they” for use with an unknown referent in informal writing and speech. However, only one of the three guides, the 7th Edition of APA’s Style Guide, fully endorses the use of singular “they” as “a generic third-person singular pronoun to refer to a person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant to the context of usage” (APA, 120). MLA, which leaves grammar largely up to the discretion of the author, neither endorses nor prohibits the use of singular “they” in this sense. As a result, it is acceptable in MLA Style. The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) has a particularly complicated history with singular “they” as a gender-neutral unknown referent. In the 1993 edition, it endorsed “they/their” in this sense (Chicago, 13th Ed. 2.98). However, this was removed from subsequent editions. Though CMOS acknowledges the ubiquity of this usage, it continues to prohibit its use and instead recommends rewriting the sentence in some way that eliminates the need for a pronoun. For more on the history of singular “they” and the Chicago Manual of Style, take a look at this 2017 article written by Cai Fischietto on IU Libraries’ website.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association by American Psychological Association
ISBN: 9781433832154
Publication Date: 2019-10-01
MLA Handbook by The Modern Language Association of America
ISBN: 9781603292627
Publication Date: 2016-04-01
The Chicago Manual of Style by University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff
ISBN: 9780226287058
Publication Date: 2017-09-05
The Chicago Manual of Style by Chicago Editorial Staff
ISBN: 0226103897
Publication Date: 1993-09-01

Style Guides on singular “they”

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition, 5.48

American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide

Modern Language Association (MLA) Style Guide

Metaphysics of Gender

While in common parlance the word gender often serves as a kid-friendly synonym for sex, in feminist and academic discussions, the two are often seen as conceptually distinct. A rough and hasty description of the sex-gender distinction might say that sex is a biological given, gender is a social construction, and never the twain shall meet. However, even if we grant the sex-gender distinction (and a number of feminists do reject it for a variety of reasons), it remains far from obvious what, precisely, gender is, what it means for gender to be socially constructed, or what we should make of gender anyway.

Fortunately, feminists and philosophers have recently taken interest in the metaphysics of gender. This LibGuide serves as a selective bibliography on some of the scholarly work being done in this fascinating and important field of inquiry. A companion subject post on this topic is forthcoming.

Getting Started
For introductory material on the philosophy of gender and feminist philosophy, check out these articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which also provides extensive bibliographies of their own that are worth exploring:

Mari Mikkola, "Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender"
Talia Bettcher, "Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues"

Additionally, the following bibliography identifies sources (within and without philosophy) on matters pertaining to trans genders, the lived experiences of transfolk, and intersectionality, and should prove a valuable resource for those interested in the metaphysics of gender:

"An Inclusive Bibliography on Race, Gender, and Related Topics" (Google Doc set up by Meena Krishnamurthy)

Next Steps
If you'd like to explore this topic further, our library subject research portals are also a good place to get started; among other things, they provide tailored, subject-based lists of research resources:

Sources on the nature of social construction, considered as such or with particular respect to gender:

Diaz‐Leon, Esa. "What is Social Construction?" European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 4 (2015): 1137-52.
Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Haslanger, Sally. "Ontology and Social Construction." Philosophical Topics 23, no. 2 (1995): 95-125.
Mallon, Ron. "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction." In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2013.
Sveinsdóttir, Ásta Kristjana. "The Social Construction of Human Kinds." Hypatia 28, no. 4 (2013): 716-32.
Sveinsdóttir, Ásta. "Social Construction." Philosophy Compass 10, no. 12 (2015): 884-92.

Sources on the genealogy of gender:

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 2nd ed. London, UK: Routledge, 1999.
Germon, Jennifer. Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Repo, Jemima. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Sources on the metaphysics of gender:

Alcoff, Linda. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bach, Theodore. "Gender Is a Natural Kind with a Historical Essence." Ethics 122, no. 2 (2012): 231-72.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 2nd ed. London, UK: Routledge, 1999.
Diaz-Leon, Esa. "'Woman' as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle." Hypatia 31, no. 2 (2016): 245-58.
Haslanger, Sally. "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?" Noûs 34, no. 1 (2000): 31-55.
Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Jenkins, Katharine. "Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman." Ethics 126, no. 2 (2016): 394-421.
Overall, Christine. "Sex/Gender Transitions and Life-Changing Aspirations." In You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, edited by Laurie Shrage, 11-27. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Power, Nicholas, Raja Halwani, and Alan Soble, eds. Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings. 6th ed. New York, NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2012.
- See, for example:
  - Ch. 14: Talia Bettcher, “Trans Women and the Meaning of 'Women'", 233-50.
  - Ch. 15: Christine Overall, “Trans Persons, Cisgender Persons, and Gender Identities”, 251-67.
Sveinsdóttir, Ásta Kristjana. "The Social Construction of Human Kinds." Hypatia 28, no. 4 (2013): 716-32.
Witt, Charlotte. The Metaphysics of Gender. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Witt, Charlotte, ed. Feminist Metaphysics. New York, NY: Springer, 2010.
- See, for example:
  - Ch. 3: Natalie Stoljar, “Different Women. Gender and the Realism-Nominalism Debate”, 27-46.
  - Ch. 5: Mari Mikkola, “Ontological Commitments, Sex and Gender”, 67-83.

Sources on feminist metaphysics and the metaphysics of gender vis-à-vis "mainstream" metaphysics:

Barnes, Elizabeth. "Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary Metaphysics." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 3, no. 114 (2014): 335–51.
Mikkola, Mari. "Feminist Metaphysics and Philosophical Methodology." Philosophy Compass 11, no. 11 (2016): 661-70.
Mikkola, Mari. "On the apparent antagonism between feminist and mainstream metaphysics." Philosophical Studies (2016): 1-14.
Schaffer, Jonathan. "Social Construction as Grounding; or, Fundamentality for Feminists, a Reply to Barnes and Mikkola." Philosophical Studies (2016): 1-17.
Sider, Theodore. "Substantivity in Feminist Metaphysics." Philosophical Studies (2016): 1-12.

Gender Studies

Spotlight on Disability Studies

Spotlight on Queer Poetry & Poetics

Spotlight on Consensual Non-monogamy

Spotlight on Black LGBTQ+ Poetry

Open Access Resources with African American Poetry Features

Scholarly sources on Black Queer Poetics:

Lists of books, articles, and media related to Black Queer Studies:

Books and essays on African American poetry

IU Resources

Open Access Resources with African American Poetry Features

Spotlight on Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Peoples

Academic Style & Gender-Inclusive Writing

Academic style guides agree: honoring and using a person’s correct personal pronoun is a matter of respect, and it's good style

More about personal pronouns and how to use them

Academic Style Guides on the importance of achieving gender-neutral writing

In 2021 Academic Style Guides are divided on the use of singular “they” as a gender-neutral unknown referent

Further reading on gender-inclusive writing

Further reading on the singular pronoun “they”

Style Guides on singular “they”

Further Reading

Metaphysics of Gender

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